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Miroslav Tichy
After studying at the Academy of Arts in Prague, Miroslav Tichy, born in 1926 in the former Czechoslovakia, withdrew to a life of isolation in his hometown of Kyjov. In the late 1950s, he stopped painting and, during his daily walks, began to take photographs of women with cameras he made by hand. He mounted his prints on handmade frames and added finishing touches in pencil, shifting from photography to drawing. Disregarding the rules of photography, for four decades Tichy created a large oeuvre of poetic, dreamlike views of female beauty.
A former neighbor, Roman Buxbaum, discovered Tichy's hidden work in the 1980s and has been documenting and collecting it ever since. In 2004, the esteemed international curator Harald Szeemann mounted the first solo exhibition of the nearly 80-year-old artist. That same year, Tichy was given the Rencontres d'Arles Photographie Discovery Award and the Kunsthaus Zurich organized a large retrospective. Solo exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art (MMK) Frankfurt followed in 2008. Tichy does not see his exhibitions, for he no longer leaves his house. This beautifully produced, thorough volume collects the work--perfectly.
A former neighbor, Roman Buxbaum, discovered Tichy's hidden work in the 1980s and has been documenting and collecting it ever since. In 2004, the esteemed international curator Harald Szeemann mounted the first solo exhibition of the nearly 80-year-old artist. That same year, Tichy was given the Rencontres d'Arles Photographie Discovery Award and the Kunsthaus Zurich organized a large retrospective. Solo exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art (MMK) Frankfurt followed in 2008. Tichy does not see his exhibitions, for he no longer leaves his house. This beautifully produced, thorough volume collects the work--perfectly.
- GenresPhotographyArt
222 pages, Hardcover
First published August 15, 2006
35 people want to read
About the author
Harald Szeemann
49 books2 followersHarald Szeemann was a Swiss curator, artist, and art historian. Having curated more than 200 exhibitions, many of which have been characterized as groundbreaking, Szeemann is said to have helped redefine the role of an art curator. It is believed that Szeemann elevated curating to a legitimate art-form itself.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
October 14, 2014
Before I even reached the abundance of photographs within its pages, the beauty of this book stunned me. When I ordered it I didn’t know if I was getting a hardback or paperback. What arrived in the mail was a big gorgeous black clothbound book with three photographs glued to the cover. Inside are literally hundreds of photographs in reproduction, on thick pages, presented in what I assume to be actual size. It even smells good. This is a book to be treasured, and I feel lucky to own it.
Miroslav Tichy is a strange man living in a fairly small town in Moravia in the Czech Republic. Strange in a bottomless kind of way; as in the depths of his strangeness can not be rationally plumbed. It’s refreshing encountering (at a safe distance via book admittedly) such deeply authentic strangeness. No poseur he. Tichy has lived a life no one envy, his psychic solitude has been so profound. It’s not the solitude of a Henry Darger, but it’s in that direction, the direction of profound isolation, as in absolutely no one else being aware of what gives your life meaning. Sure, he’s mentally fragile, and he must be diagnosable in any number of ways, but it’s not his mental illness (I use that phrase with reservations) that makes his person strange or his photographs so fascinating.
There is no doubt that Tichy is an authentic artist, though I'm sure some would argue otherwise, but what helps make him and his work so fascinating is the quiet life of utter revolt he has led since the days of communist control. Under this control Tichy went primitive, and in my mind he did this as protest. He lived in squalor, didn’t bathe, didn’t change his clothes (in pictures he’s wearing a jacket with so many visible threads looping in and out of each other from years of self-mending that it looks like a crazy bird’s nest, or a rat’s lair), and switched from oil painting to photography, often using homemade cameras. Yes, homemade cameras; cameras fashioned from toilet paper tubes and found lenses. Every day he would walk through town wielding his cameras secretly photographing people (women mostly) engaged in daily activities. He could snap a pic without lifting his camera from his waist, bragging that he could "catch a sparrow in flight". Some of his subjects just saw him as a crazy man with a crazy cardboard camera that surely couldn’t work, so there are what look like consenting portraits in the collection. But most of the pictures are voyeuristic, with the lens penetrating layers of cyclone fence to snap women lying in bikinis, or in the process of disrobing, at the public pool. A man who knew him rather intimately for years says in an essay included in the book that there is nothing sexual about his photography, but I beg to differ. Many of these are extremely sexually charged images. I’m not saying he masturbated to them in the comfort of his squalid hovel, but there’s a sexual instinct in evidence nevertheless, however sublimated into very fine art. These are not just photographs by a man in love with the female form. These are photographs by a psychically isolated man obsessed with women, and while I say he did not masturbate to the images he produced, I do think they populated some form of fantasy life. This conjecture is reinforced by the fact that many pictures were lovingly provided with matting with hand drawn frames, making them look like pictures propped up in some sort of shrine. There is a distinct “dirtiness” to the pictures – salacious and lascivious to the novice eye no doubt, but even the images themselves are dirty in the physical sense: coffee stained, gnawed by rats, trampled on by boots, etc. – but the more I look at them the more I sense a purity, an almost saintly purity, stemming from sexual sublimation in the name of Art. Tichy is a sophisticated artist, though his appearance, his “packaging”, make you think he’s a naïve or “outsider” artist.
Thinking about Tichy has reminded me of something I did two summers ago. Two summers ago I single-handedly busted a serial pervert/stalker of the upskirt variety. I think about this because for four years before busting him I struggled in my mind with whether I should confront him or not. I don’t at all consider Tichy a pervert/stalker, but he is definitely a voyeur and his actions are no doubt creepy, especially to women, and so if someone like me (a voyeur of voyeurs) had seen him snapping pics of disrobing women he/she might’ve been inspired to bust him. And we should all be grateful no one did.
From my favorite lunch time spot on a berm just outside the library I observed “my man” looking up skirts of coeds for four or five years. I knew all his routines and ploys, using a cell phone and a newspaper as props, to catch a quick upskirt glimpse. He was not picky; any woman would do. But let me describe this man to make the scenario clearer. He was a tall (6’5” or so) very dark skinned black man with a shaved head, and often he would show up in my territory, with a long loping stride, wearing skimpy nylon jogging shorts and an extreme tank top; his whole body, even his bald head, glistening with sweat. One day he even wore a sombrero. With jogging shorts! I describe him because to me he was someone who must be noticed, a stand-out figure, yet for the four or five years of my observation not a single woman knew that this very conspicuous dude was looking up her skirt, sometimes from as close as five feet away. Yes, he would set up camp with his cell phone and newspaper in an otherwise unpopulated grassy sward sometimes five feet downslope from a girl, and then his bright white eyes would begin darting back and forth from snatch to newspaper and back to snatch again. It no doubt fascinated me, but it also revolted me. It also created an ethical dilemma.
This ethical dilemma revolved around the fact that I too love to look at women. I don’t look up skirts or anything, and I have no method, but I do look at women, sometimes going slightly out of my way to do so. One day I noticed from afar two women in skirts sitting on a bench near the library, and instead of going my usual route to get in I took a detour so I could see their legs as I walked by (don’t many men do this?), and when I got near them who do I see but “my man” sitting nearby in such a way that he could see up their skirts. This little event resonated with me, making me feel as if some of his perversion had rubbed off on me.
So as I watched this guy watch women for 4 or 5 years I struggled with what to do about it. Since no woman ever noticed what he was doing, let alone go so far as to lodge a complaint, I wondered if I had the right to intervene and bust him. I started asking around to see if anyone else had ever noticed this flaming pervert, but no one had. At this point I started doubting my own observations, as if I was making it up or exaggerating what I had seen, but every time I saw him in action again I was blown away by his sick obviousness. So my next step was to invite a friend to hang in my spot with me in hopes that the perv would appear. He didn’t the first few times, and my friend started teasing me about my Snuffleupagus, but then one fateful day he was there, in flagrant action, with my friend in attendance. And my friend was utterly amazed, utterly revolted, and very mad. He said we had to do something about him immediately, and even took actions to turn him in himself. This poaching of my territory, this immediately solving a case I had pondered for four or five years, spurred me into action, and the very next day I confronted “my man” directly… which is a story I don’t feel like burdening you with at the moment. Suffice it to say that I have never seen him in action again, and however entertaining I found the whole ordeal I am glad he is not still at it, for the sake of all those girls who never even knew what he was doing.
Addenda: Since I wrote this review the perv did return and one day I actually caught him looking up my wife's skirt, or rather she caught him looking up her skirt and she informed me. At first I laughed, thinking it a perfectly fitting conclusion to the whole ordeal; but as I thought about it I got angry and started stalking the campus looking for him. As luck would have it he circled back and came to me, and I got up in his face and chewed his head off, and followed him as he tried to leave and continued chewing. I have seen him since and every time I get in step behind him until he leaves the campus.
Miroslav Tichy is a strange man living in a fairly small town in Moravia in the Czech Republic. Strange in a bottomless kind of way; as in the depths of his strangeness can not be rationally plumbed. It’s refreshing encountering (at a safe distance via book admittedly) such deeply authentic strangeness. No poseur he. Tichy has lived a life no one envy, his psychic solitude has been so profound. It’s not the solitude of a Henry Darger, but it’s in that direction, the direction of profound isolation, as in absolutely no one else being aware of what gives your life meaning. Sure, he’s mentally fragile, and he must be diagnosable in any number of ways, but it’s not his mental illness (I use that phrase with reservations) that makes his person strange or his photographs so fascinating.
There is no doubt that Tichy is an authentic artist, though I'm sure some would argue otherwise, but what helps make him and his work so fascinating is the quiet life of utter revolt he has led since the days of communist control. Under this control Tichy went primitive, and in my mind he did this as protest. He lived in squalor, didn’t bathe, didn’t change his clothes (in pictures he’s wearing a jacket with so many visible threads looping in and out of each other from years of self-mending that it looks like a crazy bird’s nest, or a rat’s lair), and switched from oil painting to photography, often using homemade cameras. Yes, homemade cameras; cameras fashioned from toilet paper tubes and found lenses. Every day he would walk through town wielding his cameras secretly photographing people (women mostly) engaged in daily activities. He could snap a pic without lifting his camera from his waist, bragging that he could "catch a sparrow in flight". Some of his subjects just saw him as a crazy man with a crazy cardboard camera that surely couldn’t work, so there are what look like consenting portraits in the collection. But most of the pictures are voyeuristic, with the lens penetrating layers of cyclone fence to snap women lying in bikinis, or in the process of disrobing, at the public pool. A man who knew him rather intimately for years says in an essay included in the book that there is nothing sexual about his photography, but I beg to differ. Many of these are extremely sexually charged images. I’m not saying he masturbated to them in the comfort of his squalid hovel, but there’s a sexual instinct in evidence nevertheless, however sublimated into very fine art. These are not just photographs by a man in love with the female form. These are photographs by a psychically isolated man obsessed with women, and while I say he did not masturbate to the images he produced, I do think they populated some form of fantasy life. This conjecture is reinforced by the fact that many pictures were lovingly provided with matting with hand drawn frames, making them look like pictures propped up in some sort of shrine. There is a distinct “dirtiness” to the pictures – salacious and lascivious to the novice eye no doubt, but even the images themselves are dirty in the physical sense: coffee stained, gnawed by rats, trampled on by boots, etc. – but the more I look at them the more I sense a purity, an almost saintly purity, stemming from sexual sublimation in the name of Art. Tichy is a sophisticated artist, though his appearance, his “packaging”, make you think he’s a naïve or “outsider” artist.
Thinking about Tichy has reminded me of something I did two summers ago. Two summers ago I single-handedly busted a serial pervert/stalker of the upskirt variety. I think about this because for four years before busting him I struggled in my mind with whether I should confront him or not. I don’t at all consider Tichy a pervert/stalker, but he is definitely a voyeur and his actions are no doubt creepy, especially to women, and so if someone like me (a voyeur of voyeurs) had seen him snapping pics of disrobing women he/she might’ve been inspired to bust him. And we should all be grateful no one did.
From my favorite lunch time spot on a berm just outside the library I observed “my man” looking up skirts of coeds for four or five years. I knew all his routines and ploys, using a cell phone and a newspaper as props, to catch a quick upskirt glimpse. He was not picky; any woman would do. But let me describe this man to make the scenario clearer. He was a tall (6’5” or so) very dark skinned black man with a shaved head, and often he would show up in my territory, with a long loping stride, wearing skimpy nylon jogging shorts and an extreme tank top; his whole body, even his bald head, glistening with sweat. One day he even wore a sombrero. With jogging shorts! I describe him because to me he was someone who must be noticed, a stand-out figure, yet for the four or five years of my observation not a single woman knew that this very conspicuous dude was looking up her skirt, sometimes from as close as five feet away. Yes, he would set up camp with his cell phone and newspaper in an otherwise unpopulated grassy sward sometimes five feet downslope from a girl, and then his bright white eyes would begin darting back and forth from snatch to newspaper and back to snatch again. It no doubt fascinated me, but it also revolted me. It also created an ethical dilemma.
This ethical dilemma revolved around the fact that I too love to look at women. I don’t look up skirts or anything, and I have no method, but I do look at women, sometimes going slightly out of my way to do so. One day I noticed from afar two women in skirts sitting on a bench near the library, and instead of going my usual route to get in I took a detour so I could see their legs as I walked by (don’t many men do this?), and when I got near them who do I see but “my man” sitting nearby in such a way that he could see up their skirts. This little event resonated with me, making me feel as if some of his perversion had rubbed off on me.
So as I watched this guy watch women for 4 or 5 years I struggled with what to do about it. Since no woman ever noticed what he was doing, let alone go so far as to lodge a complaint, I wondered if I had the right to intervene and bust him. I started asking around to see if anyone else had ever noticed this flaming pervert, but no one had. At this point I started doubting my own observations, as if I was making it up or exaggerating what I had seen, but every time I saw him in action again I was blown away by his sick obviousness. So my next step was to invite a friend to hang in my spot with me in hopes that the perv would appear. He didn’t the first few times, and my friend started teasing me about my Snuffleupagus, but then one fateful day he was there, in flagrant action, with my friend in attendance. And my friend was utterly amazed, utterly revolted, and very mad. He said we had to do something about him immediately, and even took actions to turn him in himself. This poaching of my territory, this immediately solving a case I had pondered for four or five years, spurred me into action, and the very next day I confronted “my man” directly… which is a story I don’t feel like burdening you with at the moment. Suffice it to say that I have never seen him in action again, and however entertaining I found the whole ordeal I am glad he is not still at it, for the sake of all those girls who never even knew what he was doing.
Addenda: Since I wrote this review the perv did return and one day I actually caught him looking up my wife's skirt, or rather she caught him looking up her skirt and she informed me. At first I laughed, thinking it a perfectly fitting conclusion to the whole ordeal; but as I thought about it I got angry and started stalking the campus looking for him. As luck would have it he circled back and came to me, and I got up in his face and chewed his head off, and followed him as he tried to leave and continued chewing. I have seen him since and every time I get in step behind him until he leaves the campus.
June 12, 2010
I never heard of Miroslav Tichy till I went to the Strand in NYC last week with a friend of mine. He raved about his work, I looked at the book, and I became a fan within seconds.
Tichy is from the Czech Republic and took photographs of women walking around his home town. That is not too odd, but the fact that the photos were taken by him by using cameras that were hand-made is unusual. Also the fact that he's sort of a reclusive figure who one thinks is borderline obsessive about his subject matter. Women.
But that is not really why this book is so magnificent. Tichy portraits are a mixture of drawing as well as photos - and there is chemical affects either due to the negatives being exposed to the light, or he controlled the affects via his darkroom.
A lot of the expressions on these women faces are a mixture of "I don't care" to fear. The fact that he looks like a lunatic homeless person probably has a lot to do with it. But there is also a romantic glaze, almost a conservative study of a women's body and movement. It is like painting from a class where you have a nude, but here he captures them on the streets and parks, wearing bathing suits or skirts/dresses. None of the images are sexually obscene, but more sweet with an edge to it. Remarkable artist!
Tichy is from the Czech Republic and took photographs of women walking around his home town. That is not too odd, but the fact that the photos were taken by him by using cameras that were hand-made is unusual. Also the fact that he's sort of a reclusive figure who one thinks is borderline obsessive about his subject matter. Women.
But that is not really why this book is so magnificent. Tichy portraits are a mixture of drawing as well as photos - and there is chemical affects either due to the negatives being exposed to the light, or he controlled the affects via his darkroom.
A lot of the expressions on these women faces are a mixture of "I don't care" to fear. The fact that he looks like a lunatic homeless person probably has a lot to do with it. But there is also a romantic glaze, almost a conservative study of a women's body and movement. It is like painting from a class where you have a nude, but here he captures them on the streets and parks, wearing bathing suits or skirts/dresses. None of the images are sexually obscene, but more sweet with an edge to it. Remarkable artist!
June 18, 2008
I love, love, love this book. My only complaint is that it is not larger or longer. Tichy is an extraordinary photographer and this book is a great introduction to his work.
March 18, 2013
Just amazing beautiful voyeur photos. The fact he took them with the beat up-incredible converted cameras make it that much more amazing. Must have for fans of the medium
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews